Why Illegal Immigrants Can Attend Public School | Plyler v. Doe

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In episode 26 of Supreme Court Briefs, illegal immigrants get kicked out of public schools in Tyler, Texas and a local district starts charging them to attend school there because they're illegal.

Produced by Matt Beat. Music by Jermaine Hysten. All images found in public domain or used under fair use guidelines.

Photos credits:

Pax Ahimsa Gethen

Noah Scialom

Sound effect credits:

Punch sound effect by Mike Koenig

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Tyler, Texas

1975

Under the leadership of James Plyler, the Tyler Independent School District begins charging $1,000 a year for unauthorized immigrant students to attend school there. It had justified this decision by a recent Texas law that said it wouldn’t use taxpayer money to educate students who were not “legally admitted” into the United States. Not only that, the law said school districts could deny students enrollment if their parents couldn’t prove they were legal citizens.

And that’s exactly what the Tyler Independent School District started doing. In fact, in 1977 it began kicking kids out of school if they didn’t have United States birth certificates.

In response, four families affected by this new policy sued the school district. The district court, which, in order to protect their privacy identified them using pseudonyms, decided that the kids should be allowed to go to school and found both the state law and the school district’s policy unconstitutional. They argued the law and policy went against the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The school district appealed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed with the lower court.

The district appealed to the Supreme Court, and the Court agreed to hear the case, combining it with a similar case, weirdly called Texas v. Certain Named and Unnamed Alien Child. By golly that could be a great band name, come to think of it.

Anyway, the Court heard oral arguments on December 1, 1981. The Court had a difficult time with this one, and wouldn’t announce its decision until June 15, 1982. In a 5-4 decision, they sided with the families, and struck down the Texas law that withheld funds from educating students who were illegal aliens. The Court argued that illegal aliens and their children, even though they weren’t citizens were still people, who deserved the same rights as protected under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Because they viewed education as a right, and because they weren’t hurting the state that much by going to school, the Court said these students should be able to go.

Leading the dissent was Justice Burger, who argued it wasn’t the judicial system’s place to solve this issue, but that it ought to be solved through the legislative process. This might surprise some, but the dissent actually said these kids should be able to go to school. They just argued the Constitution didn’t allow them to decide on this.

With all the debate today about DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the immigration policy that lets the children of illegal aliens not get kicked out of the country among other things, Plyler v. Doe is an extremely relevant case. Today, school administrators in K-12 public schools can’t even ask about a child’s immigration status. Notice how I said K-12. Post secondary schools can still have restrictions based on citizenship status.

Years later, James Plyler, the superintendent who fought these families who wanted their undocumented kids to attend school, who in fact this case was named after, changed his mind. On the 25th anniversary of the decision, in 2007, Plyler said that Texas law that withheld funds from educating students who were illegal aliens “would have been one of the worst things to happen in education - they’d cost more not being educated. Right after we let those youngsters in, I was pleased.”